Beware the seasonally adjusted headline – it mainly exists to give market economists something to talk about and journalists something to write about. For all the manic depressive behaviour of the last three months of seasonally adjusted retail sales, the trend has been telling a much duller story story.

As the graph shows, while the seasonally adjusted number jumps around, there’s been nothing dramatic about the trend for more than 18 months.

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The trend growth in dollars through the tills certainly isnt strong by our pre-GFC bubble standards and it softened a notch in August – 0.2 per cent, down from 0.3 and the lowest since January – but it still tells an understated story of consumers spending more money.

And they are buying considerably more stuff than the retail sales numbers indicate – volume growth has been much stronger than dollar growth over the past year as Australians have made the most of a strong currency and retailers’ discounting, particularly with some falling by the competitive wayside.

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The seasonally adjusted swings in the past three Australian Bureau of Statistics releases have all been warped by Canberra’s mini-cash splash that sent a sudden rush of shoppers into K-mart and Big W in June resulting in an amazing surge of 1.2 per cent in the month.

It was completely reasonable and predictable that after buying an extra load of stuff in June, the average consumer didn’t feel the need to repeat the effort, let alone add to it, in July – and thus the seasonally adjusted retail sales retraced 0.8 per cent. Today’s August numbers still reflect some of June’s impact with a modest 0.2 per cent gain.

Given June’s impact and whatever the consumer might be making now of a climate of falling interest rates, it’s dangerous to try to read too much about the outlook into August’s figures, particularly when the original non-trend, non-seasonally adjusted numbers can spin a different yarn again.

For example, last month’s Reserve Bank board minutes suggested the bank’s “industry liaison” with major retailers predicted a strengthening in August sales that isn’t obvious on the 0.2 per cent figure. However, the original numbers show sales of $21.237 billion in August, up by 1.8 per cent on July. August last year on the same basis recorded a 0.2 per cent fall.

With that caveat, there are a couple of observations that range from obvious to reasonable. In the first category is that Western Australia continued to go gangbusters in August, Queensland is doing OK, NSW barely OK, Victoria is weak and Tasmanians are suffering a genuine recession.

In the latter, it’s not a surprise that the seasonally adjusted estimation of household goods was the weakest of the ABS’ six categories, down 1.5 per cent. With housing sales and construction going nowhere and the kids not moving out, new household formation is weak indeed and shows no signs of immediate improvement.

Today’s trend building approvals figures for August remained flat.

As for department stores, it’s worth remembering that they are the smallest of those six ABS categories and that the discount variety (K-mart, Big W and Target) matter more than the publicity-hogging David Jones and Myer. Yes, they have super models, but they aren’t important.

But then there is the promise of rising population growth. So far it’s not paying off the way one might expect for the retail sector, but, on the other hand, consider how much weaker the stats would look without it.